Assad’s offer to renounce Syria’s chemical weapons should be put to the test: Editorial

However skeptical Barack Obama may be about Syria’s sudden offer to renounce chemical weapons, he is right to hold off threatened military strikes until Syria’s willingness to deliver can be put to the test.

It’s cold comfort to Syrians who lost 1,400 loved ones to poison gas attacks last month. And it won’t end Syria’s brutal civil war; indeed, it may prolong it. But suddenly, the United Nations has a chance to force President Bashar Assad to give up his stockpile of horror weapons, something no amount of American bombing short of destroying his regime could have accomplished.

However skeptical U.S. President Barack Obama may be about the sudden Russian/Syrian offer to place Assad’s weapons under international control for destruction, he is right to hold off threatened military strikes until Russia’s seriousness and Assad’s willingness to deliver can be put to the test.

Disarming Assad through UN-led diplomacy would prevent him from using these banned weapons again on his own people in a war that has already claimed 100,000 lives. It would send a robust signal about the impermissibility of such weapons generally, and the risks that rogue regimes face by using them.

Ghastly as Syria’s civil war has been, the growing use of chemical weapons was a special horror that raised the spectre of yet more mass slaughter such as the world hasn’t seen in a generation. Obama was right to draw a “red line” against such depravity. Not to do so would embolden Assad to new outrages, and encourage others to resort to chemical, biological or radiological weapons. Stopping chemical attacks won’t end the war, but it is a legitimate goal in its own right.

What’s needed now is a credible Security Council resolution backed by the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China that requires Syria to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, open its 1,000 tonnes or more of nerve gas and other chemical weapons to inspection, put the arsenal under international control and destroy it. Failing to deliver should trigger UN-sanctioned military action. And unlike Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Assad should face a tight timetable. These weapons must not fall into the hands of other actors.

At root the Russian/Syrian proposal may be a Hail Mary play to buy the Assad regime time by staving off devastating U.S. airstrikes against military command centres, aircraft and airfields, missile launchers, radars, tanks and artillery and weapons depots. Even a “limited” U.S. strike could have crippled Assad’s army. That bleak prospect may have moved the Russians to tell their Syrian cronies that the time had come to offer to give up weapons that until Tuesday they refused to acknowledge they had. How sincere all this is remains to be seen.

Although Obama has been roundly criticized for not striking at the Assad regime sooner, and for failing to cobble together a coalition of the willing, he deserves credit for keeping up sufficient pressure to deliver this potential breakthrough. It bolsters American credibility and buys him a political reprieve. He faced an uphill battle to persuade the U.S. public that airstrikes were justified in the absence of a lawful Security Council mandate, absent strong backing in Congress and without much allied support.

If the Security Council demands that Assad disarm, and he and the Russians prove to be playing games, Obama’s case for a military strike will be much strengthened.

Still, the prospect that Assad’s military will emerge unscathed, though bereft of its nightmare weapons, is discouraging. If the UN does manage to spike the chemical threat, it should leverage that success by pushing for a political settlement to end this war.

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